What’s truer than facts? The social value of great fiction

I work in an organisation that revolves around social research and policy. I went to grad school to study the social sciences. And there is not currently a single novel in my to-read stack, except for the half-metre tower of Game of Thrones novels, courtesy of a colleague here at the RSA.

Which is why what I’m about to say surprises even myself: As a tool for understanding human behaviour, human society, the way we think, emote, love, hate, live – the humanities are much more useful. The largest social science library doesn’t hold a candle to a much smaller handful of classic works of literature.

Of course, it took a recent social science study to help me understand this. It showed that reading literary fiction – and not nonfiction, and not ‘mass-market’ fiction – improves people’s ability to display empathy and to accurately register the emotions of others. The study asked participants to read a randomly-assigned selection of text from sources such as Don DeLillo, Smithsonian Magazine, or popular romance novels, and then to answer questions designed to assess their ability to decode the emotions and expectations of others in a given scenario. They were also shown close-up photographs of a person’s eyes and asked to identify that person’s current emotional state. Those who had read just a few minutes of classic fiction did significantly better than all the others.

This study’s findings alone certainly don’t go quite so far as my claim above. Emotional intelligence on a personal level is not the same thing as the kind of meta-understanding of human behaviour that social science affords; Shakespeare can’t tell us a whole lot about, say, the impact of switching schools mid-year, or how young people view entrepreneurship. This analysis should perhaps be narrowed from comparing humanities and social sciences to comparing humanities and modern psychology, which – like great literature – does try to explain why we do, think and feel what we do.

But the study’s conclusions do bring up important epistemological questions. True as they may be, the findings contained in a research report can be difficult to internalise, and certainly difficult to personalise. Perhaps this is because the lessons we learn best are those we teach ourselves. The artfulness of great literature lies at least partly in the way it forces us to piece together various perspectives, to become the omniscient narrator-analyst the text itself lacks. Your supermarket spy novels give the reader too much, whereas in classic literature “there is no single, overarching authorial voice,” as David Comer Kidd, one of the researchers, told the New York Times. “Each character presents a different version of reality, and they aren’t necessarily reliable. You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is really something you have to do in real life.”

I’m reminded of Tim O’Brien’s classic meditations on truth in The Things They Carried, his memoir of the Vietnam war: “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” The nervous truth for social scientists may be that the product of all the polling, interviewing, data crunching and theory testing we do – all these facts – may contain less truth in the end than an artfully crafted story that never even happened.

That’s not to say I’d give up the ghost just yet. One lesson here may be to think of social science less as a way to explain human behaviour, and more as a way to explain and refine the plastic structures of civilisation built around it. The modern workplace, for example, affects our lives as much as the confounding intricacies of love and attraction; we need innovative ways to engage workers as much as we need Jane Austen. It would be great if literature could play a complementary role in social science research, although I don’t see citing Chaucer or Chekhov in research reports becoming fashionable anytime soon.

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“Tolstoy writes somewhere about a peasant belief that a green stick had been buried in the earth and would one day be found, and then all our troubles would come to an end. I think he half believed it himself, and was always on the look out for the green stick, until at last he grew tired of looking. Never mind. The fact that a man like Tolstoy could exist amounts in itself to a green stick. It is true that today his hopes seem more remote even than when he entertained them. Yet underlying the disappointed hopes was his faith in a single infallible guide, a ‘Universal Spirit that lives in men as a whole, and in each one of us . . . that commands the tree to grow towards the sun, the flower to throw off its seed in autumn, and us to reach out towards God and by so doing become united to each other.’ Such was his last word, delivered to us, his brothers, who come after him”

The lesson for me in all this is that we somehow need to re-integrate the sciences and the arts - Snow's 'Two Cultures'.

In this vein, I'm inspired by what Yehudi Menuhin said about his friend Aldous Huxley:

"He was a scientist and artist all in one - standing for all we most need in a fragmented world where each of us carries a distorting splinter out of some great shattered universal mirror. He made it his mission to restore these fragments and, at least in his presence, men were whole again".

I would also add that there are approaches to social science that move beyond the usual objectification - and are very personally transforming. For this, I like Prof Bill Torbert's 'Action Inquiry' for example: http://www.williamrtorbert.com...

Torbert also points out that when you tot up the 1st , 2nd and 3rd person (ie I, we, it) ways of looking at 1st, 2nd and 3rd personrealities, in the past, present and future – you end up with a total of 27 potential forms of inquiry, of attention that people can make use of.

Others are making regular use of rather more of these forms of attention. Perhaps Huxley managed to use all 27...?! ;-)

I'm intrigued by what Carl Gombrich is doing at UCL with the pioneering Arts and Sciences BASc.

Another thought, are there not also intriguing findings about how adult development (in domains like morality and epistemology) seems to progress further in people who are studying arts, rather than science? Moral development even goes backwards when people train in medicine, from what I remember...!

Matthew(RSA Online Community Manager)

PS I must own up to also being someone with a pile of non-fiction to read. And no novels at all on my urgent pile. I did go through a phase of reading women's future fiction (LeGuin, Piercy etc) but that was some while back...

joehallg

7th October 2013

Great blog - I'm more optimistic than you about this! See my paper on 'speaking doubt to power: Art as evidence for public policymaking https://docs.google.com/file/d...

Sam Thomas

7th October 2013

I completely agree that fiction (and, I suppose, narrative writing in general) ought to have a bigger place in the social sciences. One possibility that you hint at is that the tools of narrative fiction can actually have a place in the presentation of findings... as it is, the most readable, persuasive research reports are those that tell a story rather than simply present facts and make assertions based on them.

If you haven't come across it, I think you'd enjoy Love's Knowledge, a collection of essays by Martha Nussbaum on the role fiction plays in helping us to reason (particularly on moral issues): http://global.oup.com/academic...

Michael Sillion

7th October 2013

Yes we need to start to think about how we use fiction to educate all ages on empathy and how we can build a sustainable society together. Especially in the Movies. It's not the dumbed down entertainment that some may think it is.